Night and Fog in Japan

Nihon no yoru to kiri

Press & Industry screenings and events are only for accredited passes.

Please note that only items from our Quiet Snacks menu may be consumed during this screening. This menu has been selected to ensure our audiences' experience is not disrupted. TIFF is committed to providing the best film-going environment possible for all audience members.

"One of the year's best.... one of the most piercing political films I have ever seen" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice). Taking its title from Alain Resnais' famous short film about the Holocaust, Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan was deemed dangerous and inflammatory by its studio and withdrawn only days after its release. Shot and acted with ferocious intensity — the ten-minute opening shot packs in more visual audacity than many directors can muster for an entire feature — the film takes place at the wedding of two radical "comrades," a celebration that quickly turns into a bitter round of denunciations, accusations, and self-recrimination as the guests (invited and otherwise) angrily lament the failure of Japanese left-wing activism in the 1950s. Called "one of the most beautiful films about youth in the history of Japanese movies" (Tadao Sato), Night and Fog in Japan ranks with Godard's La Chinoise as a key document of its age.